Most cynical of all, however, are the moralistic pundits, academics and journalists who deplore the "nativism" of Americans they consider to be less-educated yokels. Yet their own jobs of writing, commenting, reporting and teaching are rarely threatened by cheaper illegal workers.

Few of these well-paid and highly educated people live in communities altered by huge influxes of illegal aliens. Their professed liberality about illegal immigration usually derives from seeing hardworking waiters, maids, nannies and gardeners commute to their upscale cities and suburbs to serve them well — and cheaply.

In general, such elites don't use emergency rooms in the inner cities and rural counties overcrowded by illegal aliens. They don't drive on country roads frequented by those without licenses, registration and insurance. And their children don't struggle with school curricula altered to the needs of students who speak only Spanish.

For many professors, politicians and columnists, the gangs, increased crime and crowded jails that often result from massive illegal immigration and open borders are not daily concerns, but rather stereotypes hysterically evoked by paranoid and unenlightened others in places like Bakersfield and Laredo.

So, what is the truth on illegal immigration?

Simple. Millions of fair-minded white, African-, Asian-, and yes even Mexican-Americans fear that we are not assimilating millions of aliens from south of the border as fast as they are crossing illegally from Mexico.

In the frontline American Southwest, entire apartheid communities and enclaves within cities have sprung up whose distinct language, culture and routines are beginning to resemble more the tense divides in the Balkans or Middle East than the traditional melting pot of multiracial America.

Concern over this inevitable slowdown in integration and assimilation is neither racist nor nativist. It grows out of real worry that when millions of impoverished arrive in mass without legality, education and the ability to speak English, costly social problems follow that will not be offset by the transitory economic benefits cheap wages may provide.

Those fretting about delays in sealing the border along with proposed fast-track visas, millions of new guest workers and neglect of existing immigration law are neither illiberal nor cynical. But their self-righteous critics may well be both.